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YouTube videos show a black screen with audio

Created by: Rhana Cassidy

Modified on: Thu, 26 Apr, 2018 at 10:23 AM

The basic issue is that YouTube videos show a black screen instead of video. There are variations. Sometimes the player window stays black for the entire length of the video; at other times, only for a few seconds. Sometimes the audio plays; at other times, it doesn't. Users with ad blockers report that pausing the ad blocker makes the video play normally.

This isn't a new issue. We found reports from as far back as 2011. This issue has been reported with and without an ad blocker installed. When an ad blocker is involved, we've seen the issue reported with AdBlock, Adblock Plus, and uBlock Origin.

After investigating, we believe this is caused by an intermittently faulty filter in EasyList that occasionally hides the video player instead of the ad. We suspect the fault may result from some of the experiments Google often runs on YouTube.com. Since we don't control either EasyList or Google, it's not likely we can come up with any permanent solutions. However, we found some workarounds in a variety of sources after a fairly exhaustive search. We'll add other suggestions as we find them!

Workarounds

Try these first. They're fairly quick and easy and will almost always fix the problem.

Reload the page

Reloading the page will almost always get the video to play normally in any browser.

If you're using Safari and watching in full-screen mode, reload the page, wait 5 to 10 seconds, and then open the video in full-screen.

In any browser, if reloading the page doesn't get the video to play, pause your ad blocker, reload the page, and when the video starts playing normally, unpause your ad blocker. To pause and unpause AdBlock, click the AdBlock button and select Pause on this site or (if it's paused) Resume blocking ads.

In normal viewing mode (that is, not full-screen), right-click the video to show the video context menu.

If the menu says "About Adobe Flash Player" at the bottom, then you're using the Flash player and this method will work. Otherwise, skip to "Disable hardware acceleration (HTML5 Player in Chrome)" below.

Click Settings.

Clear the Enable hardware acceleration checkbox.

Click Close.

Restart your browser.

Disable hardware acceleration (HTML5 Player in Chrome)

Enter chrome://settings in the address bar.

Scroll to the bottom of Chrome's settings page and click Advanced.

Scroll to the bottom of Chrome's advanced settings page.

In the System section, slide the Use hardware acceleration when available toggle to off.

Click RELAUNCH to restart Chrome.

If that doesn't fix the problem, also do this:

Enter chrome://flags in the address bar.

Press Ctrl+F to open Chrome's search box, and then type hardware-accelerated to find the hardware-accelerated video decode setting.

Watch videos without logging in to your YouTube account or in an incognito window

This Reddit thread and other posts we found suggest Google may be trying a new way to deploy ads to get around YouTube ad blocking. This is a plausible suggestion for two reasons. The length of time the black screen appears often exactly equals the length of the ad that's being blocked, and pausing your ad blocker makes the video play normally.

The issue doesn't happen for everyone. If this theory is true, Google may be trying the technique on random users. Therefore, these workarounds may help:

Don't log in to your Google account when you watch videos on YouTube. If you are logged in, log out and then watch.

Watch HD videos in Microsoft Edge

Use the video embed URL

We received this suggestion from AdBlock fan transcendient. Try copying the video's embed URL and pasting just the video URL in a new tab. Here's how:

Use a custom filter to fool the ad script

This solution comes to us from AdBlock fan hexicgrind. His instructions are fairly easy to follow, but do require a willingness to perform some advanced tweaking of AdBlock's settings. Rather than repeat them here, we invite you to read his post in our forum.

If that doesn't help, open Internet Explorer and change this setting: Options > Advanced > Accelerated graphics and enable Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering. This should work for Edge, too.

It could be that upgrading to Windows 10 deleted your old video driver and replaced it with a new one that isn't compatible with your video card. Delete the new video driver in your video card's settings. Go to the website for your video card manufacturer (NVidia or AMD) and download a video driver compatible with your video card.Note: Some users report that the video driver suggested on the manufacturer's website is not actually compatible with Windows 10. Using the video driver for their previous version of Windows worked.

If none of that helps, try uninstalling Shockwave Flash and reinstalling Chrome.

If YouTube videos stutter, take up too much CPU, eat battery life, or make your computer hot,you can force YouTube to use the H.264 codec withtheh264ify Chrome extension, a workaround suggested bya poster near the end of thebug reportmentioned earlier: